hey everybody adam savage and i am in one of my favorite places prop store in los angeles
with brandon allenger brandon you guys i mean so many amazing pieces of iconic film history called
through your hands and this one is this is from batman the original michael keaton tim
burton batman yeah which is a film that i love so i love having this piece here this one is
not in any upcoming auction but we do have some very exciting things that come through
our hand from time to time we've actually been helping out working on some of the restoration
of this piece um and it is like you say from the first batman is the quarter scale hero
batwing model quarter scale quarter scale uh it's gargantuan and it's so beautiful
can you talk to me about some of the features i really want to hear about the restoration process
but i'd love to hear about its features first because it's a shooting model yeah no it is a
shooting model we did a bunch of research actually we talked to some of the folks in the uk you know
stephen lane prop store has a lot of ties to the uk filmmaking community and so we were able to
talk to greg morgan who is the model maker in the uk who built this originally for batman phenomenal
and it's it's really interesting they did three different scales and it's all under the direction
of derrick meddings who's the famous british model maker who does all the bond things and superman
the movie and they did this scale the largest for the detail shots with the functionality they had
one that was about two feet which was basically for the crash shots i think that one's m.i.a no
one knows where it is and then i think they had a little one that was only about five inches large
for the shot where it goes up in front of the moon in silhouettes and then pauses yeah great classic
shot right that's awesome but this one was large enough had to be this large so they could get all
the functionality into it so each time i saw a high close-up in the film this is the model you
got it exactly yeah anytime you're seeing close up and you can tell it doesn't move a lot in the
frame it's relatively static in the frame and you never see the very back of it where it was mounted
so you start to pick up pretty quickly which one it is but it has that functionality
and we just went through a big restoration process with it originally it was all pneumatic
so it was all on these air conditioners oh god yeah obviously yeah i didn't want to
set up a compressor and such so we converted it to mostly linear actuators and servers so
can i take you on a tour you want to see something oh you have a control box there's a control box
yes so this was um the restoration work was all done by a model maker we work with named jack
jorian who also worked on our nostromo project yeah a few years ago i love the way you guys
covered that whole project too that was a lot of fun and you know we still have it it's a
great piece we love it sci-fi history models are interesting because they're kind of like cars like
time tends to take a toll on them and they can be rebuilt and reworked and reset like
cars right well and yeah you leave something that you've wired up for a few years and you don't know
connections getting lost and yeah i mean i've had to repair stuff uh from star wars for lucasfilm
while filming and sometimes these pieces just deteriorate you gotta keep them up yeah well let
me show you some of the features here some of the fun so we'll start with the wing lights oh
nice we've got the wing lights there and then if i can direct your attention to batman himself no
way we've got a little bit of life there in his head you can bleep that oh my god okay so why
is he missing his emblem what's going on well you know the the piece obviously time had taken some
toll on it and so the original emblem was missing as was the cape the cape is actually a replica but
it is the original little batman figure all the cockpit deep detailing is original um and that was
mostly intact mostly well preserved things like the missiles the guns and such those are original
but it had been repainted a number of times in its life so most recently it's been repainted
again to try to improve on prior repaint work and make it as close as it could be to the film so we
got together a big collection of reference images that's my question how do you go about replay like
this thing probably was painted on set while it was being filmed as well it got a paint job but
then on set you change things how do you decide on what's the hero finish i mean we just tried to
go with the very best reference that we had and so you know we did collect some nice photos we looked
at the screencast but obviously film changes things right yeah sometimes a lot especially in
terms of the warmth and coolness of colors yeah yeah on film that reads very dark very sort of
black and blue in reality from what we can tell from the production movies a little bit hotter
a little bit more silver in the finish like this really trying to replicate i think a real aircraft
yeah um and this is am i correct this is anton first design yes so there's a good story there
too actually that we researched anton first you're absolutely right the production designer
but he didn't actually do the final design drawings they were done by a guy named
julian caldo who's a uk concept artist and julian's quick to credit anton first
obviously he was a production designer he came up with a lot of the overall concepts but julian drew
not over not not only the batwing julian also drew the famous 1989 tim burton batmobile wow and his
drawing julian's drawing is actually frequently published with anton first name on it but if you
actually look at anton first drawings they don't look anything like that he has a totally different
sort of gothic style well and the the the parity between the batmobile and this is total but they
feel like two pieces of equipment generated by the same mind which totally makes sense and for
me probably the best bat vehicles that were ever done i mean just that they sort of perfectly live
in the comic book world but also the real world yeah and the schumacher stuff i think went too
crazy i would agree this is just the right place and the dark knight is a little too gritty for you
i mean i love dark knight too i just picture it as a totally different thing sure
it's sort of it's like a real world take on batman as opposed to the comic book tape okay but we got
off on painting and i think there's still some more there's more good motion there's more tools
i want to see it move so how about let's look at the missiles here we can deploy the missiles
oh yeah and in the film they went to an insert shot of a larger model that was really detailed
but these little brass missiles do their their own right so they did a close-up they went even
larger for that scale so you can see them clearly look at that that's machined out of copper yeah
it's really a lot of work's gone into that and then let me show you the gatling gun on the side
and once we get it deployed we can fire that and then we can also run
the matching throws are you kidding me and that's basically what you see on film you see the gatling
gun spinning and you see the strobes going and we set it up with real strobes again just like that
i i was wondering i was like are these christmas lights
they're strobes uh we've got the wing flap there that will oh nice the brakes and then
finally if you remember the gag in the film where the balloon uh if i can get the box running
the clippers the clippers come out and he basically grabs the balloons oh my god
and then pulls the balloons back in and there's also a saw
what oh there it is there's the sauce you work in conjunction with that is actually a milling
machine yeah oh my god and then he literally pulls the strings back and cuts them across that saw
because you got to be ready for cutting balloons in your batwing oh my god now when you were model
maker did you build a lot of models that had functionality in them for specific gags and films
or was that less common um yeah no i don't think i ever worked on practical gags on ships all the
ships i built for lucasfilm were static models and before that yeah almost all static models
i've definitely done close-up insert shots but not on the model so i mean is it kind of a rarity do
you think to have a model where they build this much functionality in i it often is actually the
most functionality the most aesthetic work i ever put into a model was for space cowboys
and that was that shuttle was crazy detailed and it's because eastwood runs very cheap uh on
purpose and so they whereas normally you would make different ship parts for different insert
shots he wanted our one seven foot model to supply every in-circuit we needed yeah so when he steps
out into the airlock that's a 12-inch wide model i built uh that's the only time i would imagine that
tim burton working on his first movie is doing some economies yes so to put so much functionality
into a single model speaks to we didn't have the budget necessarily to do a separate machine gun
for every single shot right right yeah and it's interesting that the close-up shot in the film is
this model i mean that gets blown up full frame on the movie screen you know the tight close-up
and i think it holds up pretty well i mean i think they did great practical work on this
film the meetings crew the british crew and great designs great models i think it's an amazing thing
and it actually it speaks to its design that it's still thrilling to look at uh what 35 years later
definitely yeah and it's you know to take the batman the shape of the emblem of the chess
logo and convert it into an aircraft it's just it's sort of perfect um and it was a lot of fun
having it here doing some of the archaeology on it you know like i say it had been resprayed a couple
of times and so when we got out the paint thinner working with the model makers who were helping us
fix it up we were able to uncover in certain areas the original markings which had been fully covered
but they were they were still there and then we could trace them and recreate them exactly as they
were so i mean every prop is different but i'm i'm curious about like as you every prop requires its
own amount of research its own kind of dive into what is correct but i'm i'm curious about how much
this will inform your future restorations the the kind of economies that you make yeah i mean
in my opinion it's it's all about this term sympathetic restoration it's like you want it
to look like it did on film but you don't want to go too far and make it look brand new so we
tried to keep as much originality as this as we could unfortunately it had been resprayed and
that necessitated a further respray it would have been great if it was never touched if it was never
touched and the paint was just battered then i would have said leave it you know it doesn't need
anything but in this case it made more sense to do a fresh paint job that was as close as it could be
to the original and models are sort of akin to cars in that way it's like you can repaint it
it's still the original model obviously we'd all love for it to have its original finish but it
doesn't so this is as close as it can be you know it's a gorgeous restoration brand and i really
thank you for giving me the deep dive it is such a pretty model dudes see you next time
thank you guys so much for watching that video if you'd like to further support us
here at tested one of the single best ways you can do it is through a tested
membership now there's a link below as to the various levels of tested membership
but at the top level i want to explain it's so much more than videos that are exclusive there are
q and a's there are live streams there are some exclusive videos but the thing i love most about
the tested membership is the interactivity the constant and wonderful communication between the
tested members and not just me but our entire team every day it feels more and more like a beautiful
community just devoted to the joys of making so join up and become one of us one of us one of us